Thoughts on Life: Gems and excerpts from professor J.B. Peterson lectures

An antidote to the default dissatisfied state of human existence:

“What makes you think that if you had everything you asked for that that would satisfy you? What if being dissatisfied is part of what dissatisfies you? What if the fact that you have to have limits and need them, and that there’s an element of insanity to the world and there’s an element of insecurity and vulnerability, what if that’s what you need? What if it’s what you want? What if that’s what gives your life meaning?”

An approach to problem-solving:

“To think about life as a problem that is to be solved rationally is insufficient because you’re not a rational being, or you’re only partly a rational being, you’re also an emotional being, and you’re a motivated being, and you’re an embodied being and that’s a lot different from being purely rational.”

Somewhere along the process of evolving from nature, humans developed consciousness, and more often than not, you don’t necessarily have problems, you’re just simply ‘conscious’:

“Deeply rooted in the western tradition, roughly speaking, is the idea that people are divorced from some early paradisal state and that it was the emergence of something like self-consciousness that produced that demolition of humanity and left us in a damaged state. People think they don’t believe that, but they believe it all the time, and it’s frequently helped people experience themselves as if there’s something wrong that needs to be rectified.”

On trait conscientiousness; being industrious with a high sense of morality, and a strong work ethic are all very positive attributes, however to a certain extent. Do not be too conscientious:

“.. when things happen to you that aren’t what you want or expect, it’s an open question how much you’re responsible for it, now a conscientious person, under those circumstances, will just take themselves apart, because the conscientious person is liable to presume that if something bad happens to them it’s because they did something wrong, and you can see that’s useful; if something bad happened to you because you did something wrong and you can learn what you did wrong and fix it then the bad thing won’t happen to you again, it’s a wonderful way of thinking, but it’s very tricky because there’s a random element to life and sometimes you get knocked flat by circumstances that are really beyond any reasonable person’s control…”

Something to live by:

“… you’re not in a static place, that’s death, you’re not in a chaotic place, that’s death too, you’re balanced between the static and the chaotic such that the static structure is transforming at exactly the right rate to keep on top of the environmental transformations.”

Because we owe it to each other to share ideas and experiences, and lower the inherent loneliness to the human experience, and we owe it to ourselves to read about the experiences of our precedents, here’s an excerpt from one of our stoic fathers:

“Of all people, only those are at leisure who make time for philosophy, only those are really alive. For they not only keep a good watch over their own lifetimes, but they annex every age to theirs. All the years that have passed before them are added to their own. Unless we are very ungrateful, all those distinguished founders of holy creeds were born for us and prepared for us a way of life. By the toil of others, we are led into the presence of things which have been brought from darkness into light. We are excluded from no age, but we have access to them all; and if we are prepared in loftiness of mind to pass beyond the narrow confines of human weakness, there is a long period of time through which we can roam.”

Seneca, The Shortness of Life